The US Under President Trump: Unpacking the Next Four Years

- The Trump administration will enact change quickly

- Ending bad policies such as debanking would likely be a priority

- Bipartisan support for changes hoped for and expected

Change, as far as the crypto industry is concerned, is going to be rapid under President Donald Trump’s tenure.

The expert panel comprising of Sheila Warren, CEO of Project Liberty Institute, J. Christopher Giancarlo, former Chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Teresa Goody Guillén, who leads BakerHostetler’s Digital and Innovative Markets, discussed upcoming changes once US President-elect Donald Trump takes office, in a lively and wide-ranging session moderated by David Wachsman, Founder and CEO of Wachsman.

According to Giancarlo, Trump has the tiers of moves to implement: “the easy to do, the challenging to do, the very hard to do.” Turning to the easy-to-do tasks, ending bad policies such as debanking would be of great benefit, he noted and may well include “the firing of personnel responsible for debanking to begin with, and a neutral policy (for) total crypto activity.”

Another move would be to end hostility to institutional custody, he added. Giancarlo predicted that the President would order the Treasury to stop selling seized digital assets shortly after taking office.

“The Biden administration has been actively selling it. They’ll end the sale. So right then you can get the stockpile. And I think that’ll be well into other promises of crypto Council, the statutory framework exists under our Federal Advisory Board, laws that can begin out of the NEC to begin that council,” he predicted.

The harder bucket of policies would revolve around bringing in good policies. “And that’s where we’re going to need bipartisanship. And I think we will have it,” Ginacarlo said.

Teresa Goody Guillén, of BakerHostetler’s noted the importance of the industry coming together. “You know, if you wait for the government to come and tell you what the answer is, you’re never going to like it. You’re always going to say that you always have to come together. This is what every other industry does, and I think that’s really important for us to do,” she explained.

“This really is kind of the national approach, which is what Trump wants to do within the first 100 days. And that’s it, it’s 100 days. It’s quite fast. It is fast, but I think it’s doable,” she added.

Looking back at how the Biden administration handled things, Sheila Warren, noted that the four years of the administration have to be looked at as a whole.

“And so the first two years of administration, you had a pretty neutral and positive stance at crypto, actually, if we’re being honest. And then we had FTX in that whole situation. And then you had two years of really outright, in some cases, outright war against crypto,” she said.